Senior Software Engineer - AI

About Compare Club

Compare Club is a leading platform in Australia offering comparison services across numerous household expense categories to simplify purchasing decisions for consumers, helping them save money and gain peace of mind. The company employs over 500 staff across locations such as Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, and international offices, all committed to delivering value by reducing household bills.

Role Overview

We are looking for a seasoned software engineer to collaborate closely with our Principal Engineer in developing the next wave of intelligent applications through spec-driven development and agentic coding frameworks. This hands-on role involves crafting detailed specifications, enhancing and maintaining agentic tooling, reviewing generated code for quality, and contributing AI features to our products within agile squads.

This position demands a deep appreciation that in an agentic workflow, responsibilities shift rather than disappear, requiring expertise in specification, system architecture, verification, and harness design. Working with a high degree of autonomy, you will address challenging technical problems, set engineering excellence standards, and foster growth among fellow engineers. If you are passionate about delivering innovative AI that powers robust products, you are encouraged to apply.

Primary Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain scalable, reliable architecture for AI-driven product subsystems in partnership with company leadership.
• End-to-end delivery of product features within squads, ensuring superior quality for both human-crafted and agent-generated code.
• Lead the adoption and execution of spec-driven development methodologies, authoring precise specifications to guide agentic implementations.
• Develop and broaden the agentic infrastructure, including Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations and secure tool invocation mechanisms.
• Research and prototype innovative AI technologies and frameworks to address business challenges.
• Mentor engineering team members in advanced spec-driven practices, context engineering, and contemporary CI/CD pipelines.
• Provide technical leadership on complex projects, steering them from initial concept through to launch while managing ambiguity effectively.
• Advocate for high standards in automated testing, secure coding, and comprehensive evaluation of AI models.
• Communicate intricate AI technical constraints and strategic insights clearly to diverse stakeholders including engineers, QA, and non-technical teams.

Candidate Profile

• Minimum 5 years of professional software engineering experience with a history of delivering complex, production-grade features.
• Strong foundation in software design, with language and framework independence and proven architectural decision-making capabilities.
• Practical experience in building secure agentic loops, MCP servers, and integrating specialized tools, with expertise in spec-driven workflows.
• Familiarity with AI service providers such as Anthropic, OpenAI, Vertex AI, and knowledge of agentic communication protocols like Model Context Protocol; experience with LangChain or LangGraph is advantageous.
• Deep understanding of system design, including distributed architectures and security concerns related to agentic workflows, such as prompt injection and permission management.
• Commitment to quality through rigorous automated testing, continuous evaluation, and implementation of guardrails ensuring dependable agentic workflows.
• Outstanding communication skills, capable of conveying complex AI-related constraints and strategic directions to both technical and non-technical audiences.

Why Join Compare Club

• Collaborate with smart, inquisitive colleagues who value continuous learning and genuine teamwork.
• Experience a flexible culture focused on outcomes and making significant impact.
• Develop your career in a fast-paced, expanding environment offering clear advancement prospects.

Additional Information

The position is Sydney-based with a hybrid work setup. Interested candidates should include in their cover letter a summary of their key programming languages and tools, architectural patterns they've applied, specific accomplishments with measurable impact, and details on how they incorporate AI in their development processes.